It is estimated there are currently more then 90 million Baptists worldwide, in around 300,000 congregations.
Some say that the Baptist movement originated when John the Baptist baptized Jesus with a deep water immersion in the River Jordan.
A Baptist believes in Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah of Israel and who has confessed that faith by submitting to an immersion in water in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
The origins of the Baptist Church in the American colonies started with Roger Williams, who established a Baptist church in Providence, R.I., in 1639.
In 1608, a group of English separatists, led by John Smyth, established the first English Baptist congregation in Holland.
The Particular Baptists were founded in 1633.
The General and Particular Baptists united into a single body called the Baptist Union of Great Britain and Ireland in 1891.
There are two main views about the origins of the Baptists: Baptist origins in the 16th and 17th centuries and Baptist perpetuity.
Some see the Baptists as the descendants of the 16th century Anabaptists (which some view as a product of the Protestant Reformation and others view as a continuation of the older pre-Reformation non-Catholic churches).
Some say the first independent Baptist Church was that at Augsburg, Germany, in about 1524.
Others see the Baptists as a separation from the Church of England in the early 1600s.
Puritan separatists John Smyth and Thomas Helwys are acknowledged by numerous historians as key founders of the modern Baptist denomination.
The early Baptists were divided into General Baptists who were Arminian in theology, and Particular Baptists who were Calvinistic in theology.
The Baptist perpetuity view (also known as Baptist succession) holds that the Church founded by Christ in Jerusalem was Baptist in character and that separate, yet similar, churches have had perpetual existence from the days of Christ to the present.
This view is theologically based on Matthew 16:18, where Jesus is speaking to Peter, "And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it," as well as Jesus' commission and promise to be with His followers as they carried on his ministry, "even unto the end of the world."
The Baptist perpetuity view sees Baptists as separate from the Catholic Church and the Protestant religious denominations and considers that the Baptist movement predates the Catholic Church and is therefore not part of the Protestant Reformation.
Those holding the perpetuity view of Baptist history can be basically divided into two categories: those who hold that there is a direct succession from one church to the next (most commonly identified with Landmarkism), and those who hold that while the Baptist practices and churches continued, they may have originated independently of any previously existing church.
While there is no direct evidence to support "Landmarkism" or "Successionism" in Christian history, the modern Baptist movement owes its theological heritage to the earlier "Frei Kirche" movement as embodied in the writings of Balthasar Hubmaier, an early Anabaptist theologian, who was killed for his beliefs on the rite of baptism in the early days of the Protestant Reformation.
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